Review
Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland(CUP)
Distressful Country?
A collection of essays both elegant and interesting - with or without the added violence, says Sean McMahon.
In his poem ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1937) WH Auden gives a kind of stock-exchange report on the reputation of contemporary literary figures:
‘Joyces are firm and there there’s nothing new; Eliots have hardened just a point or two’
Writing today he might have had to add, on reading this book, that in modern Ireland violence is still at a premium. The given theme of violence is made an opportunity for the writers of these nine essays to expatiate on this island now. The book’s title comes from Sean O’Casey’s first popular play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1922) set in a Dublin tenement during the Tan War in which Donal Davoren, self-described as ‘poet and poltroon’ proves himself to be the second and decidedly not the first. The play’s title commandeered for this book is entirely ironic, a fact that none of the commentators, not even Beatrice Shrank, whose essay is called ‘Sean O’Casey and the Dialectics of Violence’, adverts to. His sense of the early 20th century may indeed be shadowed by gunmen but his plays were essentially dismissive of Yeats’s line, as he cried, ‘A terrible beauty is Borneo!’
The first paper, Peter Hart’s disquisition ‘On the Necessity of Violence in the Irish Revolution’ suggests that all that delirium of the brave was ultimately unnecessary. It is straight historical commentary and all the more persuasive than the literary studies that seem to strain to meet the connotation of the title. Sean Farrell’s ‘On Writing an Orange Dolly’s Brae’, an account of the mythologizing of the day when on 12 July 1849, ‘We kicked the Pope all over Dolly’s Brae’ in the Catholic enclave near Castlewellan, County Down, has the same persuasiveness. ‘Sexing the Rising’ by Danine Farquharson, is in fact a sexed-up account of two modern novels that use the Easter Rising as a backdrop for private passions. Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim Two Birds are only incidentally involved with the event that both authors treat almost as a kind of stage set. The explication is fine but the entrance fee is the appliqué violence.
One of the more interesting pieces is a study by Professor Elmer Kennedy-Andrews of the poetry of Ciaran Carson, shown to be the most truly valid representative of the city of Belfast for reasons neatly indicated by comparison with the work of the self-exile Derek Mahon, the apparently uninvolved Michael Longley and the non-urban Seamus Heaney. Other studies are of Ireland’s response to imperial wars, Irish movies about the Troubles (and the lack of expression of Unionist attitudes), an anatomisation of Neil Jordan’s film Angel and a final, philosophical meditation by Richard Kearney stimulated by the opening of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park in New York. Cork University Press has produced an interesting, elegant and relevant book, that did not need the umbrella of the title.
